Even If I Fall

by Abigail Johnson

  “Don’t,” I say, blinking my eyes dry. “Don’t. Jason, you can’t.”

  For a second I think I’m asking too much, that he’s reached a breaking point and no longer cares what will happen to him once I’m gone. But then he sniffs again and wipes one eye with his shoulder, a gesture small enough not to attract undue attention.

  I exhale.

  “No,” he says. “I know Uncle Mike never thought about doing what I did. I knew it even when the knife was in my hand.” His head lowers so that no one in the room, not even I, can see his face. But I don’t have to see him to hear the tears in his voice. “’Cause now I don’t have either of them, and the girl I love is as gone as he is. If I’d thought about it even for another day, I’d have realized that I should have loved her enough to want her to be happy, even if it wasn’t with me.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek, hoping the sudden, sharp pain will keep my eyes from welling up again. I want to say something to banish the sadness from him, but I can’t do that for him anymore. I know now that I never can. My voice is thick when I finally find my words, and I don’t know if they’re the right ones but they’re all I have. “What you did—Jase—” I swallow down a sob. “It was terrible. I understand now, but I can’t—it’s not my forgiveness you need. I know you know that. But I love you. You’re my brother and I’ll always love you.”

  It’s another minute before he can look up at me, and I need just as long to compose myself. He wipes his face as discreetly as he can, but when he meets my gaze and his fingers twitch on the table in my direction I’m grateful for whatever holds them back. “I want you to sleep at night, Brooke. Will you be able to sleep now...that you know?”

  After a moment I nod, but the truth is everything he told me is wrong and sad and I ache so much to change the past for all of us that I don’t know if the nightmares will ever leave me.

  When visiting hours end, it’s with heartbreaking uncertainty that Jason lifts his arms.

  I don’t have to hug him, we both know that. It’s enough, more than enough, that I came to see him at all. I don’t feel ready to embrace him, not when just looking at him has been so hard. I love my brother, I do, but he still did something unfathomably evil. He killed someone, someone he claimed to love, someone whose loss torments someone I care deeply for.

  I’m not ready to hug my brother.

  But I tell him I’ll be back to visit him again next week.

  CHAPTER 45

  I all but collapse into Maggie’s waiting arms when I reach the parking lot. She takes the keys to drive so I can continue to ugly cry most of the way home. She pulls over a few miles before we hit the Telford city line and performs all manner of witchcraft and sorcery on my face so it’s mostly hard to tell that I’ve been crying for the past few hours.

  “Thank you,” I say, when she refills the makeup bag that she packed in advance with my shades. She apparently knew before I did that forgiving me had been a foregone conclusion.

  “Figured you wouldn’t want to go home looking like the girl who snot-cried her guts out halfway across the great state of Texas.”

  My laugh comes out a little more watery than I’d like. “No, I wouldn’t.”

  Maggie shifts in her seat to face me. “I can’t even imagine.”

  I sniff and nod. “It hurts that I could be so wrong about him, and yet, in a lot of ways I still feel the same. I know he deserves to be in prison for what he did—he knows it too—but I...”

  “You still wish he wasn’t.”

  I lift my gaze to Maggie’s and see that her eyes are shining. “I know I shouldn’t want that, but I do.”

  “Why shouldn’t you?”

  That’s when I tell her who Heath is to Jason, who he’s become to me.

  She falls utterly silent.

  “I don’t know if it would matter if I knew Cal’s family or not. They would still deserve justice. I don’t want to take that from them and I’ll never try to, but I can’t help feeling both things—love for my brother, and yet because I’ve seen Heath’s grief firsthand, I feel that too. I feel it now more than ever, because I know exactly what Jason did.”

  Maggie still says nothing.

  So I tell her what happened at Heath’s house too.

  She has to fix my makeup again when I’m done. And her own.

  I think it helps to get it all out. Laura and I have talked endlessly over the past week, about everything except Heath. I’m not ashamed about Heath, but it all felt so impossible in my head that I could never let the words reach my lips. It doesn’t feel any less impossible saying them to Maggie, but I don’t feel as alone with them.

  “What does that even mean Heath was with his brother’s girlfriend?”

  I drop my head an inch. “I don’t know. I don’t want to think they were together—not that we were, exactly—”

  “Brooke.”

  I sigh. “It means he lied to me. At the very least it means that.”

  Maggie pauses, then says, “And at the worst?”

  I shrug to deflect from answering. At the worst it means he didn’t care about me the way I cared about him.

  “Are you going to talk to him? Ask him?”

  “He just let me leave, Maggie. He didn’t try to explain or stop me. I don’t think he even looked at me.”

  “I bet he was in shock.”

  “I was too.”

  She tilts her head sideways against her headrest. “What if you guys had been in your house? What if your parents and Laura had walked in and found the two of you? How much would you have been thinking about him and how much would you have been thinking about them?” She sets her hand on my arm. “Whatever the answer is, multiply it by a million, because he isn’t the same thing to your family as you might be to his.”

  She makes me cry again. Everything makes me cry. I know she’s right. I knew it even before she said it, but it was easier to focus on him lying to me than to think about what Heath must have be dealing with this past week. Definitely self-recrimination for bringing me into his house, maybe even for letting me into his life at all.

  That thought pierces straight through me because, lie or not, I don’t think I’ll ever regret him.

  “I think you should talk to him. If for no other reason than to let him explain. And maybe, tell him where you’re at now.”

  I nod, though I stay silent. I can’t imagine seeing him again, telling him anything about the reality I’ve lived this past week. Whether he can explain Allison or not, I don’t think he’ll ever be able to just see me again.

  I don’t know that he’ll want to try.

  * * *

  Laura is on the porch waiting for us when Maggie and I pull up. I don’t have to ask to know that Mom’s absence can be explained by Dad still making sure she gives me some space.

  Laura stands when we climb up the steps and I hug her.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. “It hurts but it’s okay.”

  She nods and wipes the corner of one eye when she pulls away, then turns to Maggie. “Thanks for going with her.”

  “Thanks for letting me know she needed the company.”

  Seeing my best friend and my sister together is like a balm on my bruised and battered heart. It makes the decision I have to make crystal clear in my mind. I know Maggie will be all over it and I have to hope it will show Laura that neither of our lives are over.

  “I think I want to film my Stories on Ice audition,” I say. “Will you help me?”

  Maggie repeatedly fist pumps the air, then slowly lowers it when she sees me watching Laura’s face.

  My sister smiles at me even as her eyes fill with tears. “You have to try, right? We all have to try.”

  CHAPTER 46

  Laura lets Mom and Dad know where we’re going, and we pile into Daphne as soon as I’m changed. The rink won’t be empty
at this time of day, and Jeff will likely be apoplectic seeing me show up with my sister—two Covingtons—during business hours, but if I don’t do this now, I’m worried I’ll lose my nerve.

  Thankfully, the ice isn’t too crowded when we get inside, and people give me plenty of space once they see Maggie with her camera. The music pumping through the rink’s speakers isn’t what I’d planned to skate to, but Maggie says she’ll strip the audio and add the music in post when she edits the video.

  I know my routine; I’ve practiced little else the past week, but there’s a queasy clench in my stomach when I step out on the ice. Or there is until I see Laura’s beaming face beside Maggie’s. After that, I don’t see or hear anything else.

  I don’t skate flawlessly the first time through my routine. I wobble on my sit spin and the landing on my double toe loop is far from clean. But as Maggie is quick to remind me, she’s good for as many takes as I am. So we film the jump again, and I spin until the world seems to turn with me. I skate for the pure, simple joy it brings me. I skate knowing my sister is watching and is proud of me. I skate because my best friend never stopped believing I could. I skate because it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, and because now, I don’t have to feel like I’m trading one part of my soul for another. My family isn’t going to wither away if I’m not there to stop it. For the first time in a year we’ve started growing again.

  And I love my brother, but I know now that I don’t have to sacrifice my future because of his past. I can show Laura that she doesn’t have to either.

  I hockey stop in front of Maggie and Laura when I’m done, and I don’t need to see their faces to know I skated well. It never felt better, more hopeful. I felt free. I still do.

  We’re all three of us talking over one another as I sit to remove my skates and tie my sneakers back on, when Laura gasps beside me, followed almost immediately by a similar sound from Maggie. The hairs on the back of my neck rise as I straighten.

  Maggie tugs a statue-still Laura to her feet, whispering frantically in her ear to get her to move as Heath walks slowly toward me. He glances down at my untied shoe, then drops to one knee to tie it while I’m too stunned to do anything but watch. He stays kneeling in front of me when he finishes and looks up.

  “I never imagined you would look like that.” He nods his head toward the ice without looking away from me. “It was beautiful. You were beautiful.”

  I don’t feel beautiful. That gloriously soaring feeling that lifted me on the ice deserted me the second Heath knelt at my feet. “What are you doing here?” I ask, letting the pang in my chest color my voice.

  “I found you here the first time and the second. Thought it couldn’t hurt to try again.” His smile, slight as it is, doesn’t touch his eyes.

  “Heath.”

  His gaze flicks back and forth between my eyes. “I didn’t know what to say to you.” I try to look away but he follows with his head to stay in my sight line. “You were there. It wasn’t good.”

  No it wasn’t good but it was real. There’s always been this huge, gaping canyon between us, one where my brother and Cal would always reside. It was there under the live oak, back when we needed the rain as an excuse to see each other, and it’s still there now. There’s no way to reach each other, and the longer we keep ignoring or pretending otherwise, the more people—like his mom and sister—we risk hurting in the meantime.

  To say nothing of each other.

  His hands, which were resting on the top of my foot, slide up to the bench on either side of my hips, bringing him painfully close. His eyes are all over my face and I feel his gaze like a caress. “But I’m here because I missed you. Tell me you missed me too.”

  I can’t. I can’t even squirm away, because that would be like denying I’d missed him too. “People are starting to notice us.” My eyes dart to a woman slowly skating past, as though scrutinizing a car wreck on the side of the road.

  “Brooke,” Heath says.

  I have to drag my gaze away from her even as I feel more and more eyes settle on us. He’s staring at me, and only me, in a way that says, unlike me, he never looked away.

  “I don’t care who’s looking. I haven’t for a long time.”

  “You should,” I say. “And you do care.” I’m not judging him for that day at his house. He did the only thing he could do. I can tell from the way his expression softens that he knows what I’m referring to.

  He draws back a little, just a little, his hands moving to the front edge of the bench. “I wish that could have been different. I’m not saying that introducing you to my family would have been easy, but it shouldn’t have been like that. I should have done better by you. I tried to explain it to them, you and me, but...” He lets the word trail off. “It’s a big ask.”

  “Bigger than you and Allison?” I expect the question to make me feel small and petty. What does it matter when his brother is dead and mine is gone? But as soon as the question passes my lips I know it’s neither.

  I’d let myself care about Heath—more than care about him. He was the first person who knew about my brother that I didn’t push away. I have to know if I was wrong about him, even now that it’s over.

  His eyes leave mine for the first time. “It’s not what you think.”

  “You—” I start, and then have to swallow before I can get out the rest. “You never told me about her and them. And you.” I’m glad he’s not staring at me, because I can feel my chin quiver. “I told you about my nightmares and all the time you knew—”

  “No.” His head jerks up. “I never met her until after Cal died. I knew about Allison and my brother because he told me. I knew about his guilt and his love for this girl he thought he had to walk away from, was going to walk away from rather than hurt his friend.” His eyes find my face again and the quiver I can’t stop in my chin. “I also knew it was over, that Cal’s killer was in jail and now I was the one with the girl that I was supposed to walk away from. I would break what was left of my family’s hearts—my heart—if I didn’t.” My eyes prick because I see it, his heart breaking right there in front of me.

  “I didn’t know I was going to care about you when we met. I didn’t know I was going to track down the girl my brother loved—something I hadn’t been able to do when it was just my nightmares I was living with, but yours?” His face scrunches up like he’s in pain. “I found her number in his phone and asked her to come to my house, told her there were some things of Cal’s he’d have wanted her to have.” He swallows as if remembering something he doesn’t want to and I hold my breath. “She started crying the second she walked into his old room, and I talked to her, grieved with her until Gwen came home.”

  “Did she even recognize Allison?”

  Heath nods. “There were pictures of her on his phone. Nothing bad,” he’s quick to add. “Just more pictures of her than anyone else. Gwen knew he must have cared about her and decided real quick that I had no business being with her, innocent or not. And it was innocent, Brooke.”

  I try not to flinch when he says my name. I do all the same. I actually believe him, which makes it worse. “You still didn’t tell me. That day at your work. I was so—” I close my eyes “—broken, and instead of telling me what you knew—that there was more to know—you let me leave.”

  Heath shakes his head. “No. I found Allison because I thought she might know something that would help you, not hurt you more. I wanted that for you, and I didn’t find it.”

  It’s my turn to shake my head, not in denial but because for every second that passes without telling him about Laura, I’m doing the very thing that I’m accusing him of.

  “Hey.” Health lifts a hand to cup the underside of my jaw. “It’s not us. It was never us, okay? However hard it may be for some people to accept, the crime wasn’t yours.” He glides his thumb along my cheek. “I was wrong. I was such an idiot to h
ave ever treated you like it was.”

  Gently, even though I want to do the exact opposite, I tug his hand away, following it with my eyes so I don’t have to see Heath’s face.

  “What if I did,” I say, my throat so thick it’s painful to speak. “What if I found something that would hurt you more, should I tell you? Should I protect you from the truth too?” I’m still holding his hand, so I feel his tendons tense even though his face is expressionless.

  “There is nothing that can hurt me more.”

  But he’s wrong. He’s so wrong.

  “My little sister...she was there hiding in the woods that night. She—” my voice cracks. “She saw everything. There was no fight. Cal... He was there to tell my brother he was leaving, that he was sorry. Jason led him on, made him think he was going to accept the apology so Cal would come close enough...” I can’t say the rest. I don’t have to say the rest.

  Heath’s other hand moves to his head and clutches it. “Did she—” There’s almost more air than sound passing through Heath’s lips. “Did she hear if he said anything before he died?”

  “He didn’t say anything.” Tears are welling up in my eyes and his when our gazes meet. “I know all this, what he did, but he’s still my brother and I’ll always love him even while I hate what he did. And I know that means that you and me...” I shake my head. “Heath, I’m so—” I don’t get the sorry out before Heath has me in his arms.

  “No,” he says and I feel his lips moving against the crook of my neck. “I don’t need apologies from you. I just need you.”

  Maybe people watch us, maybe they whisper and gasp. Maybe they skate by without noticing us, or not caring if they do. The only thing I know is that Heath is still holding my hand when I introduce him to my sister.

  And he never lets go.